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Th e  Yellow Papers Series  Introducing the Chief Communi ty Ofcer Marketing Has Changed. So Must Its Leadership

How Do We Engage Consumers to Become Brand Loyalists

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Everyone now faces the

same situation – how dowe engage consumers tobecome brand loyalists andadvocates?

The Italian writer Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedosa wrote, “If you want thingsto stay as they are, things will have to change.” Nowhere is this truer thanin the eld of marketing, where we have probably seen more change in thepast ten years than the previous fty.

The increasing sophistication of consumers, new behavior-alteringtechnologies, channel growth and media fragmentation, and the speed oftransactions and innovations, among other factors, have all combined tochallenge marketers everywhere regardless of company, industry, size,or geography. Every company, every brand, everyone now faces the samesituation – how do we engage consumers to become brand loyalists andadvocates?

We have been exploring these challenges through DDB’s series of YellowPapers. In the past year, this thought leadership has covered the issues ofreinventing how we market, including:

and evolved to the valuable content channel it is today.

to dialogue; that is from broadcasting to a passive herd to engaging anactive swarm of consumers and inuencers.

in the ideation of products and services as well as the communicationsmeant to drive awareness, trial and purchase.

swarms play in determining whether consumers ock to or ee brands.

messages.

who move rapidly with shared conviction win the day – speed hasbecome the new big.

Introducing the Chief Community Ofcer The Yellow Paper Series 01

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Introducing the Chief Community Ofcer The Yellow Paper Series 02

A year ago I addressed the Association of National Advertisers’ annual conferenceand shared my thoughts on how we should be reorganizing to take advantage of thechanging face of marketing. One recommendation, which I continue to advocatestrongly, is the introduction of a new marketing role: The Chief Community Ofcer

(CCO).

Why Another Chief?Marketing and branding are now a dialogue. We are moving away from a viewof the world solely dened by the doctrine of herd marketing – one-way, masscommunication – and recognizing the increasing power of people communicatingwith each other and with companies. In this new era, successful brands will be builtthrough brand communities.

The responsibility for building successful brands will continue to ride, in large part, ongreat creative directors and marketing leaders who can dene the strategic directionand expression of a brand. Acknowledging the evolution in communications, manyof the best creative minds and CMOs have begun to lead the charge in transitioningto community engagement, jumping with enthusiasm into many new interactive andnontraditional areas of marketing.

However, I believe agencies will need a very strong and inuential advocate tohelp adjust to this emphasis on community. Someone at a very high level needs totake responsibility for guiding brand marketing efforts to reach and inuence thesecommunities and for ensuring that these new skill sets resonate throughout theagency. The more digital communities inuence consumer behavior, the moreI believe we require an entirely new marketing function: the Chief Community Ofcer.

In fact, this function may require multiple people at multiple levels. One levelmay involve responding to feedback from consumers. Another level may involvedecisions for creating marketing activities that engage these consumers. Still othersencompass things like the product development dialogue between you and yourbrand community, or the service dialogue.

Today these are all disjointed functions that fall under a variety of titles: marketing,public relations, R&D and customer support. Each of these roles has its own agendaand its own pressures; for example, I am sure that many VPs of customer care

have goals that revolve around quality service and daily lives that are consumed byaverage hold times and costs per call. Worse, many of these functions can conictwith one another unless they are steered in the right direction at a high enoughmanagement level.

Chuck Brymer is President and CEO, DDB Worldwide, one of the largest and most awardedadvertising and marketing agencies in the world. Formerly the head of Interbrand Group, Chuck is one of the foremost experts on brands and marketing and has worked for many of the world’s most well-knownand successful companies.

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Introducing the Chief Community Ofcer The Yellow Paper Series

This is an area where things need to change. We traditionally frame the marketingprocess around the endgame of selling products, to the point where some consider“sales and marketing” a unied discipline. Open a marketing textbook from 20 yearsago, for example, and you will see a focus on the traditional “four Ps”: product, price,place, and promotion.

We need to move from the four Ps to the three Cs, a construct I advocate in mybook, The Nature of Marketing, Marketing to the Swarm as well as the Herd . Theseare conviction, collaboration and creativity. In this world a Chief Community Ofcerideally oversees the relationship between brands and their communities, not just inthe narrow connes of how a consumer interacts with a product at point of purchase,but also in how consumers interact with each other. These consumer-to-consumerinteractions take place on the web and on the street and serve as a powerfulinuence in shaping our views and preferences. A Chief Community Ofcer implicitly

understands how to align all areas of marketing to inuence consumers and engagetheir communities around brands.

A Chief Community Ofcer ideally overseesthe relationship between brands and theircommunities.

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This principle applies to advertising agencies as much as any business and I amputting my own money where my mouth is – where I feel our future lies. Chief Community Ofcers have already been appointed at our DDB New York and Parisofces and we have recently started hiring for this position at some of our other majorofces around the world. For example, take the Chief Community Ofcer appointedat DDB Paris. He not only has a great creative track record, but he is also a successfulblogger, video journalist, and author. Put his name and DDB’s in a search engine andyou will nd thousands of entries. He is about as plugged in as they come.

This is where I see our own creative leadership heading in the future. As a companyculture, we never were much for simply sitting around in conference rooms concoctingbrand messages. We have always been tightly integrated with our clients and ourconsumers, and now we are shifting toward a closer, more interactive relationship with

the digital swarm as well.

In fact, our afliate RadarDDB is a prototype agency which uses Web 2.0 technologiesand new social media channels to seed relevant brand dialogue into the daily lives of consumers. This approach builds engaging brand relationships and recaptures someof the inuence lost in a world of consumer-generated content. The Chief CommunityOfcer is the rst step in bringing this function into the marketing organization andassimilating the process across all marketing disciplines.

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1Forward-thinking Chief MarketingOfcers have started to see the worldthrough the lens of community, anda Chief Community Ofcer can helpformalize this role. The rst role involvesrecalibrating the way we think aboutbrand building. Let me walk you throughhow it compares with the traditional viewof marketing:

services by “listening” to the market,a CCO makes sure consumers havea real voice in the process.

advertising, a Chief CommunityOfcer works to build a communityaround your brand, using multiplechannels.

activities and seeing areas like serviceand support as tacitly “someoneelse’s job,” a CCO takes greatinterest in what consumers are tellingthe company and each other.

message, a CCO makes sure yourorganization is living its message.

consumer, the CCO views the entirecommunity as the new consumer.

Introducing the Chief Community Ofcer The Yellow Paper Series

Four Roles for the Chief Community Ofcer

Now I would like to move from my company to yours, and paint a picture of the kind of Chief Community Ofcer I think you willneed to effectively inuence and manage your relationship with your consumers, whether you are an agency or a client. I see

four key roles for this person: changing thinking at the organizational level, understanding and managing points of leverage,monitoring and responding to the community, and then going a step further and serving as a community agent. Let’s look ateach of these roles.

The term “Chief Community Ofcer” correctly implies an advocacy to the community. A good Chief Community Ofcermust serve as an evangelist who works hand in hand with rms and their Chief Marketing Ofcers to develop a much betterunderstanding of the communities that will help advocate their brands.

Recalibratingthe way wethink aboutbrandbuilding

This leads us to a central issue: results.If you were to ask me if the ultimate goalof a Chief Community Ofcer was toproduce nancial results, what wouldI say?

The rst answer I would give you to thisquestion would be “yes.” The secondwould be that you are asking the wrongquestion.

I feel that every job should improve thenancial posture of its organization. Andthere should be some reasonable way of measuring this success to provide Chief Community Ofcer accountability. ButI am going to tell you something equallyimportant: Too much pressure for short-term results runs contrary to the goals of working with the swarm.

Currently, the lifespan of a Chief Marketing Ofcer’s job is often measuredin months, even among some of theworld’s largest brands. According tosearch rm Spencer Stuart, the averageCMO tenure is less than two years.Research from the Harvard BusinessSchool suggests that one of the keyreasons for this is that expectations for

short-term performance change are toohigh.

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We know enough about swarm behaviortoday to say that building an engagedbrand community is key to growth andsuccess. We also know that buildingthis community involves steps that maynot immediately equate to short-termsales: things like listening to consumers,co-creating products and services withthem, and creating an infrastructure thatattracts a community.

Personally, I feel that a Chief CommunityOfcer should be held accountable forengaging the community in the shortterm, and for nancial performance inthe longer term. A different set of metricswill help people get a handle on theirrelationship with the community, andwhether they and their organizationare helping it or hurting it. From there,my belief is that the nancial results of successfully engaging consumers willgenerally speak for themselves.

First Role

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This leads us to the second role:understand and manage points of leverage. A Chief Community Ofcershould be someone who understandsall patterns of inuence online andofine, in much the same way a mediaplanner understands patterns of media

consumption. This means knowing thetouch points of your brand community,studying their wants, needs, andlifestyles, and using this data to informyour marketing efforts.

How does this differ from traditionalmarketing? The mind-set of a traditionalChief Marketing Ofcer is to look forinuencers to create “buzz” among themedia, the power users, the bloggers,and the industry experts. “Buzz” is greatbut it only begins to tap into the socialcommunity.

One of the core principles from my bookis that today you can nd inuenceeverywhere, and a Chief CommunityOfcer should ideally be a student of how patterns of inuence and leverageemerge and dissipate. What happens

when a hot new product eruptsonline, or a public relations ascodraws thousands of comments to theblogosphere? And how should yourespond to these stimuli?

I would propose that a Chief CommunityOfcer become a student of “new buzz,”the kind of inuence you cannotnecessarily wine, dine, or inuencewith a press release. Your key points

of leverage were once journalists orbloggers, but today they also lie in thecommunity’s gathering places. So nowyou are also looking at things like whatyou say in a product forum, or how you

Introducing the Chief Community Ofcer The Yellow Paper Series

become astudent of

“new buzz”“seed” new products to consumers whowill talk about them, or how you handleservice recovery knowing that someonecould be recording the call.

For example, in June 2006 an AOLuser by the name of Vincent Ferrari

recorded his experience trying to cancelhis account with an aggressive anduncooperative phone representative andthen posted it to his blog. The resultingrestorm of publicity put Ferrari in thenational media spotlight. Consumerist.com dubbed his recording “the bestthing we have ever posted.” Less thansix weeks later, AOL shut down theirretention centers and switched much of its service to a free advertiser-supportedmodel.

As one example of where we areheading, the Word of Mouth Marketing

Association (yes, there is one) lists whatthey see as ve basic elements formarketing from person to person:

products and services

their opinions

share information

opinions are being shared

supporters, detractors, and neutrals

According to consulting rmInuencer50, fewer than half of inuencers today are traditional oneslike journalists and analysts, whorepresented almost 80 percent of inuencers as recently as the 1990s.

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This means that a Chief CommunityOfcer should be able to identify whocan inuence people at every level,from good media advocacy to thinkingmore like a customer. Today we need tounderstand everyone who can engageand lead the swarm.

Old buzz is not going away any timesoon. If a large newspaper runs apositive story about you, or broadcastmedia starts talking about you, or OprahWinfrey chooses your book for her bookclub, people will ock toward you. Butwhen you multiply this kind of exposureby what happens when people begin totalk to each other, engage their socialnetworks, blog, Twitter or text, you startreaching beyond response rates andgetting small points of leverage thatcan lead communities to ock towardyou. In a digital world, leveraging a smallnumber of people can quickly becomethe voice of a hundred, a thousand, oreven a million or more.

The “Whassup” campaign for BudLight, which Adweek recently named

one of the greatest campaigns of thepast three decades, is a good exampleof engaging the community. While itreceived signicant media exposure, itsucceeded by catching the attentionof the community and becoming a“cultural catchphrase” and an “internetsensation with countless parodies.”Even eight years later a pro-Obamaparody “received over three million viewson YouTube” within just a few days.

“Naturally, some tuned in for the politics.But no doubt a great many also feltnostalgia for just ‘watching the game,having a Bud.’” Barbara Lippert, Adweek.com,

Feb. 4, 2008

2Second Role

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The third role of the CCO is to monitor and respond to the community. For fun, trydoing what your consumers do: Go online and search for your product or service byname to see how people rate it and what they are saying on discussion boards. Youmight even try entering the name of a company with the word “sucks” after it andsee what comes up.

Then go visit some of the sites devoted to discussing consumer problems, likeConsumerist.com or product discussion forums. Often you will see gruesome talesof poor service, indifferent employees, or bad products. More important, you willoften see posted comments on how the rest of the swarm feels about these brands.

Now, look to see how companies respond to complaints. Once in a while, someof them will actually post a reply explaining their side of the story or apologizeand make things right. More often than not, you will see no response at all. In myview, a Chief Community Ofcer should be aware of what the swarm is sayingabout a company and responsible for developing a strategy to engage the swarmappropriately.

A recent Motrin web ad illustrates an example of the power of social media and the

need to listen carefully to your brand community. The “ad designed to commiseratewith moms about the aches and pains that come with toting around baby” had avery negative effect because it also suggested that “babywearing” was a “fashion”that made parents look “tired and crazy.” Motrin quickly pulled the ad and issued anapology after the resulting backlash of moms via Twitter crashed Motrin’s websiteand was covered extensively by online and ofine media. Nothing can substitute for

joining the conversation. AAAA Smart Brief, October 18, 2008

Not everyone shares the idea of engaging consumers in cyberspace. For example,one blogger complained to retailer Target about what she felt was a sexuallysuggestive billboard, and received a reply stating that “Target does not participate

with nontraditional media outlets.” This response garnered a lot more publicity thanthe billboard controversy itself, with the snub eventually landing on the pages of The New York Times – these examples represent the risks and rewards in the newworld of communications.

Introducing the Chief Community Ofcer The Yellow Paper Series

A Chief Community Ofcershould be aware of whatthe swarm is saying about acompany and responsible fordeveloping a strategy to engagethe swarm appropriately.

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3Third Role

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The last role of the Chief Community Ofcer is to serve as a community agent. This role facilitates moving from delivering brand messages to engaging brandcommunities. This is where the community in Chief Community Ofcer reallycomes in: creating an environment where swarms of consumers interact with you,and, ideally, each other.

Traditional marketers, on the other hand, advocate being the “voice of the customer,”a concept derived from sterile analysis far from actual contact, behavior or custom.What I am proposing is that a CCO must learn where these consumers live and movethere, at least guratively.

Specically, I see a number of ways in which the Chief Community Ofcer can help

channel efforts of the marketing team to turn consumers into communities:

and your organization have a voice, from traditional contact mechanisms to socialnetworks.

developing incentives to connect with your brand.

places like online discussion forums to real ones that get community membersinteracting with each other where they live and work.

and empowering those who are (or could be) closest to your brand.

Sometimes harnessing a brand or product community even has an immediate costbenet. Take customer support as an example. Some companies, like Apple and Dell,are harnessing the energy of their own best consumers to provide peer support on topof their regular customer service through community forums that are monitored andmoderated by employees.

Product communities like these do much more than reduce the cost of service,however. They harness a level of collective knowledge that few companies alonecould muster, in much the same way as resources like Wikipedia emerge from the

input of its users. They provide a sense of how the community is feeling about specicproducts and services. Most of all, they help people who identify with your product toestablish their own voice.

Chief Community Ofcers can help create the environment that nurtures and rewardsthese voices: perks, insider privileges, gifts, and perhaps even opportunities for co-creation. They can make it possible for key people to test drive your latest car, reviewyour new computer, or go backstage for your next show. Ideally, they turn consumersinto partners and evangelists, and in the process turn engagement into inuence.

Introducing the Chief Community Ofcer The Yellow Paper Series

In the process, turn theengagement into inuence.

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4Fourth Role

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Introducing the Chief Community Ofcer The Yellow Paper Series

On Any Given Day

The Chief Community Ofcer is responsible for developing strategies thatbuild brand inuence and open opportunities for brands to engage moredeeply within social networks.

These are skills requiring an overpowering curiosity into how communities

work. They are unstable groupings, moving quickly based on newinformation and experiences. In order to know them, you need to spendtime every day with them, be part of them, understand their positive andnegative contributions to the brand, be interested in their problems andsolve them, do them favors, and dialogue empathetically and passionately.This requires a huge investment of time.

Chief Community Ofcers must be experts in content and channel. Onemust be at home with new technologies and comfortable with the relaxed,

yet powerful manner of communications.

However, the most important thing about having a Chief Community Ofcerin your organization goes beyond a job description – it is a mind-set. Itmeans looking at the relationship between you and your brand communityin much the same way you look at your own family or community, as arelationship that needs to be nurtured and maintained. These communitieshave enormous inuence over purchase intent and should be considereda key ingredient in the ability to generate sustainable relationships withcustomers.

1, Vincent Ferrari, “Cancelling AOL”, http://www.insignicantthoughts.com/?s=Cancelling+AOL

The Chief CommunityOfcer is responsible for developing strategiesthat build brand inuenceand open opportunitiesfor brands to engagemore deeply within socialnetworks.

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DDB Worldwide Communications Group Inc (www.ddb.com ) is oneof the world’s largest and most inuential advertising and marketingservices network. With more than 200 ofces in over 90 countries,DDB provides creative business solutions by its proprietary philosophyand process built upon the goal of inuence. DDB and its marketingpartners create and deliver unique, enduring, and powerful brandexperiences for competitive advantage.

DDB is excited by ideas. We invite you to visit our website to share yours andkeep abreast of ours. We believe that creativity is the most powerful force inbusiness and that ideas get sharper with more minds rubbing against them.